


Soft Summer Mover

by orphan_account



Category: Yes (Band)
Genre: Crossdressing, Genderplay, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2017-11-28 04:49:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/670450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon finds a way to explore himself and remain incognito while he and Chris go on holiday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soft Summer Mover

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vapours](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vapours/gifts).



> written for two people but one of them isnt on ao3 to my knowledge!!! i marked this as "other" in addition to "m/m" because it felt right. 1973.

Jon had decided that he and Chris needed to go location-scouting to find the secluded, wooded locale in which to record the band’s next album, which meant that Chris had to come up with yet another pseudonym and find an inn in a town small enough not to know who they were so they could go on holiday in peace. Each time the band had downtime they had done this, something of the like. Everyone else stayed away from each other so nobody knew about their trysts, and in any case Chris had become something of an expert. This time his name was Edward Russell and he would be staying a week in a bed and breakfast in southeastern Cornwall, near the ocean.

But when he arrived at Jon’s house to pick him up and leave that Friday morning, letting himself in as he always did and making his way through the house, following the sound of Jon’s welcoming calls, he wasn’t quite sure he’d found Jon when he did. He had to squint to confirm.

There was his singer at the vanity in his bedroom, curlers in his night-colored hair, an array of crèmes and lotions and powders of all sorts of colors all spread before him. He held a tiny, cylindrical brush to his eyelashes and combed it through them. When he finished, he looked up at Chris, his skin smoothed to an even, porcelain complexion, his dark wispy eyebrows filled in by pencil marks the color of his hair, light blue powder shimmering atop his eyelids.

As if anticipating any possible wording of any possible question Chris could have asked, Jon said to him, “Now, there are going to really be a terrible lot of people down in Cornwall about now, you see, my Fish, ‘tis the summer, after all, and the lot of them will want to be going and having a time down at the beach, they will. We neither of us want to be discovered, do we? So you see my plan.” He concluded with a satisfied hum through his lips and turned back to the mirror, where he inspected his face for a moment longer before turning his attention once more to a series of black and gold tubes on the vanity.

The plan. Chris saw the plan, and he understood it, but he still had to study the tactics. “When did you learn how to put on makeup?” he asked.

“Well,” Jon began, and it seemed he couldn’t make up his mind which tube to reach for, as he tapped each with a fingertip, all eeny-meeny-miny-moe. “Remember when we were on the telly in Germany? And they had us all in the dressing room and got the lot of us prettied up to play. I was watching myself in the mirror all the while, as the bird put this and that on my face, and I thought to myself, goodness, don’t I look just lovely? So I asked the girl however I did this and however I did that and she taught me all of it, gave me some wonderful tips, she did, and every so often I practice and now I’d like to go down to Looe with you and be ‘Joanna’ for a few days, to keep us both safe. I look rather like a Joanna, don’t I, Christopher?”

Chris scratched the back of his head, let his hand trail down to the back of his neck and rest there. He’d spent so long eyeing Jon’s—Joanna’s—face that he hadn’t even noticed anything of him from the neck down. “You’re wearing a skirt,” he said.

“Oh, it’s lovely, isn’t it?” Smiling, Jon turned back to him again. He let his hands bounce in a tapping line down from the frilly, lacy, white cotton top he wore to the floor-length skirt in question, a dark blue garment the color of Jon’s eyes, decorated with white and pink flowers accompanied by their green leaves. “It’s ever so comfortable, too, I daresay. The way it flounces about, I feel rather free, I do. Just delightful.”

He went on for a bit about where he’d gotten it, somewhere on the outskirts of Chelsea, but Chris had stopped listening the moment he realized Jon had stuffed his shirt. Which he really thought unnecessary, given the lad was already busty enough to pass for a small B-cup if he held his breath, but he wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t say anything about any of the sight before him.

Jon in women’s clothing. Chris hadn’t known he’d wanted it until he saw it.

“You look gorgeous,” he said.

“Thank you, my love,” Jon replied, and he turned back to the tubes—lipstick, Chris guessed—and pursed his lips as he thought.

Chris meanwhile sat on the edge of the bed, nearly forgetting by now that they had a road trip to get on with, quite a long one, really, and they still had to stop and get some petrol on the way. How could he be charged with remembering, though, when the man he’d loved for these five-plus years was turning himself into a woman for a week? He watched Jon sort through the tubes before ultimately choosing to turn instead to a basin of pink powder and apply it by way of a pouf to his cheeks. Chris watched his face in the mirror, watched the blush rise. So close, he thought, to the color that showed whenever they made love. His Jon made a fine Joanna.

Except…“Jon.”

He spun around. “Yes?”

“That color eyeshadow,” he said. “It’s all wrong for you.”

Jon huffed, looked in the mirror at it, and huffed a second time. “It looks lovely on me, you haven’t the foggiest idea.”

“I do too have the foggiest idea,” Chris replied. He pushed his way off the bed, loped over to Jon’s side, and searched among the colored powders and thin pencils for something he felt sure would require instinct. “Your application is wonderful, I’ll give you that much. But it doesn’t do anything for your coloring. You’ve got such nice pale skin and dark hair and all, and your eyes are the prettiest shade of blue I’ve ever seen. They need something to accentuate them, not glitz them all up.” At last, as if to reward Chris’ faith in himself, a pale gold powder called to Chris from between a dark brown one and that gaudy periwinkle. He grabbed it and slid it toward Jon. “Wipe that blue off and replace it with this.”

And though Jon pouted through the entire ordeal, he did as told, cleansed his eyelids of the blue and adorned them instead with gold, and when he called Chris back from the bedside to inspect he was met with nothing but approval. The gold shine mirrored the brightest parts where the light hit Jon’s hair, and where it shimmered in a bead in his eyes, and where the shadows just began to touch his skin, a muted gem behind his mascara-thick lashes.

“What about my lips, then?” Jon asked.

Chris answered, “Red” without hesitating. Jon pulled the appropriate tube from among its replicas and opened it, smeared it carefully onto his lips, and turned again to Chris, waiting for some remark, it seemed, when Chris couldn’t think of anything to say once he saw what he did other than “My beautiful Joanna,” because he wanted to kiss him and get the residue of that lipstick on his own lips but he wouldn’t dare risk undoing the work Jon had just done, not now, not when he was so gorgeous, so perfect, so colored like a geisha or a doll or like the wife he’d pretend to be for the next seven days.

With a high, guttural noise from somewhere between his chest and his throat, Chris gathered Jon into his arms and rested his chin on the top of his head, a curler pin jabbing him in the jaw until he nuzzled away from it. “God!” he cried. “God, I love you. I love you so much. I love you, take your hair out of these things and let’s go, I love you.”

After Jon replied, “I love you too, my handsome, handsome Edward,” he let each black ringlet spring free from its curler and hang loose about his head, and he gathered his bags, and once he’d followed Chris out of the house and to the car, “he” would, for a week, be a “she.”

 

~

 

Even after they’d stopped and filled up the car roughly five hours separated Chris and ‘Joanna’ from Looe. They passed the first few singing along with the radio, arguing over which station to play, reminiscing about interviews, arguing about how the interviews had gone, the upcoming album, arguing about the upcoming album, and, of course, staring in opposite directions out the windows of the car, watching the scenery change from city to field, town to more field, city again to field. At one point Jon rolled his window down to inspect a long line of pink flowers decorating the side of the road, and he stuck his hand out into the air blowing past to feel the heat travel against his skin.

“Drat!” he said.

Chris glanced over. “What?”

“Gone and lost a ring,” Jon answered. “Not the one you gave me, don’t worry, that one’s on my left hand. Ohh, but it was such a lovely one, it was, and now the wind’s gone and stolen it. Joanna would’ve looked a right duchess in it.”

Sure enough, the ring Chris had given to Jon was on his left hand, on his ring finger, a silver Scorpio glyph, as if Jon’s birth and his de facto marriage were bound together by destiny or something he could hijack to call destiny. Chris snickered. “You’re quite the method actor, aren’t you? It’s enough to make me guess you’ve just been biding your time, waiting for the opportunity to pretty yourself up in frills and lace and makeup and play a lady.”

Jon pouted at him, crimson lips puckering, ready to start an argument, since they hadn’t done so in some time. “And whatever’s the matter with that?”

“Nothing!” Chris replied. “Nothing at all. It’s just intriguing, is all. You’re always saying to me you’re a man, not a boy, not a girl, you’re a man, and then here you are.”

“I’m a man still.” He looked out the window, refusing to reward Chris with his attention. “You haven’t got to look like a man to still be one.”

It seemed for a second to be the end of the discussion, so Chris turned his gaze on whatever was on his side of the car, drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel. But the words tapped again and again through his mind with each strip of paint he passed on the highway, and he looked back at Jon and asked, “ _Were_ you wanting to dress up as a lady?”

“I’m exploring,” Jon answered, after a moment he spent wiggling in place. He still wouldn’t look at Chris. “Everything just seems so much more complicated than ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ you know? After all, look at it the way of lovemaking. To create a new life the body of a woman and of a man must come together for a moment, merge, become one soul neither male nor female. Look at it from every perspective! Do we not fall outside the roles set for us by all around us, Christopher? We are the two of us each a man in love with another man. Everything is complicated. I’m only exploring so complicated a matter, I am.”

Chris said, “Huh,” the most he could ever say when thoughts clouded and swirled about in his head and he had to stare at the road ahead and let his body take over driving while individual words of meaning coalesced from the mist until he thought, perhaps, he was beginning to understand, on the same level that he understood how to fire the neurons that told his insides to break down such-and-such chemical and disperse it through his bloodstream. He couldn’t explain it if he tried, but he understood.

“What would you like to do first when we get to Looe,” he said. “Joanna?”

Jon—he—Joanna— _she_ smiled, and turned her pretty, made-up face toward him. “Be with my husband,” she replied.

 

~

 

When they arrived at the bed and breakfast the plump old woman who ran the place bustled them upstairs and showed them their room, a sunny circular place on the third floor of a Victorian-style turret. One bed, one dresser, one small television, bright open windows, and a door out to a balcony overlooking the water, everything the newlyweds Edward and Joanna Russell would need for a week to celebrate their first anniversary.

She downed their story the way the two of them would their tea at breakfast the next morning. She gave them a key and a spirited, “Welcome to Cornwall, dearies” before shuffling out to let them pack.

Which the newlyweds Edward and Joanna Russell did for about thirty seconds before Edward approached Joanna from behind, his hands slipping from the back of her waist to the sides of her hips before they swallowed the front of the middle of them, and he asked, “What should we do, love,” and she answered, “Take me like I’m a woman.”

 

~

 

They hardly left the room the whole week. Some days they emerged only at mealtimes, Jon flushed either from playing Joanna with rouge or with his body, and their cheery innkeeper smiled about them, tottering from one plate to the next with pancakes or toast or soup or pie.

“You’ll have a long, lovely marriage, I’m sure,” she said. “My husband and I, we were the same way.”

Which Chris doubted. He doubted it to the point that he forgot about it as soon as he and his boy-bride scurried back to their room and stripped, Jon’s body incongruous to the way he told Chris to address him and touch him. Chris obeyed, of course. He lay Joanna down, fondled her chest, nibbled at it, sucked at it, spread her legs to lave around her inner thighs and avoid, carefully, that bit of her that every day he grew better at disassociating with womanhood. Then he’d coat himself in lotion and from whichever angle, whether atop like she was his virgin to deflower, or from behind so he could continue groping at her chest, or from the side so he could see her natural blush overtake the powdered one, he would enter her, aiming more consciously than ever for the spot that made her cry out for him. And regardless of whether in that moment her cry was “Edward” or, forgetful, “Chris,” in his turn, he always replied, “Joanna.”

But the innkeeper’s words came springing back to his consciousness whenever he rolled away from Joanna in bed, while the two of them let the panting and the sweating subside. He wondered about their relationship, the one they had year-round, back in London or wherever their tours took them. If they could call it a marriage it was one full of bickering, one constantly on the rocks, but balancing on the two wedged most solidly into the sand, never any closer to the roiling sea and never any closer to the solid ground. Yet through the bickering, and sometimes even because of the bickering, Chris loved Jon, and even if things weren’t always lovely he hoped they’d be long.

And if they weren’t long, well, he almost didn’t want them to be lovely. It would hurt too much, spending years until his death missing the lovely times, the times like this. One day he lolled his head to the side to look at his spouse, Joanna for now, and she rolled her reddened face toward him in kind, smiling a coral-lipped smile, a trickle of liquefied mascara smearing from the corner of her eye where gravity had pulled a tear from the duct, as she’d been lying there so long, and the sun hovered outside and diffused throughout the room, the pale yellow walls the color of a dawn cloud. They’d left a window open and the scent of the sea mixed with that of their bodies, all salt everywhere, but the trees flanking one side of the house diluted it, made it a kind of clean salinity, a bath salt in the atmosphere.

“You know, I’d love you whether you were a man or a woman or something in between or neither,” Chris said, the first time in days that he’d willfully brought to attention anything to do with Joanna’s gender other than the one-hundred-percent femaleness of it.

“I know that,” she replied. “You already do love me that way, right this second.”

With his last bit of strength Chris flopped to his side and let his arm land on her, and he pulled her towards him, and held onto her as if letting go meant he would float up into the sky and into space, a dry, desolate, cold, airless place, a sterile place, lifeless and neutral, and he wished they could suspend themselves in this second, “right this second,” until eternity petered out and there was nothing left for them to experience together. The lovely moments. Give me the long marriage, he thought, even if it’s not always lovely. My Joanna, my Jon. Please. Please. I beg you.

 

~

 

Though they smelled the beach every day from their room they nearly forgot about it as a place they could visit until their last full day at the bed and breakfast. They woke up that Thursday morning, made love in bed, got dressed and ready, ate the innkeeper’s breakfast, and headed out. Joanna, walking wobbly-legged from the earlier tryst, begged Chris to carry her on his back, and he did.

She wore a one-piece swimsuit under her wraparound skirt, gauzy white cotton so close to transparent that anyone looking could see the ghost of her swimsuit and legs underneath. She hadn’t bothered stuffing her chest. But she said to him, “I’m not getting in the water, I don’t think.”

“Why not?” Chris asked. The sun had heated the sand under his feet so that he had to make quick work of stepping across it, as if attempting to pass some initiation ritual. “We came all the way out here for the beach, didn’t we?”

Of course they hadn’t. But Joanna seemed willing to humour him, and she made a sound before giving her reply. “It’s too windy.”

There was no wind. Chris knew there was no wind because he felt nothing, not even a light breeze sending his hair fluttering about his shoulders, but he said nothing and acquiesced to Joanna’s unwillingness, chalking it up to some quirk that lay between brain and heart. He set her down when he found a spot, set up their towels, and lay with her, still in her skirt, her unmoving skirt, in the sun until he felt he’d combust.

“I’m getting in the water,” he said, and she waved him off when he did.

Compared to the heat he’d accumulated Chris found the water almost unbearably cold at first, but a few minutes spent ducking under the waves and tipping his head back to submerge himself all the way to the forehead got him used to the temperature. He could swim just fine, always had, and he knew how to maneuver his long, slippery body around the other beachgoers, children in inner tubes, chubby wrinkled women bracing themselves sideways against the waves, so well that a more arrogant demon nibbling away at his psyche told him he’d be mistaken for a merman or a kelpie if he grounded himself on the pier of rocks jutting out from the beach like he wanted to.

But a lonelier demon drowned out the hushed growl of the arrogant one. Chris looked back again and again to the shore, where Joanna sat in her skirt, under a wide-brimmed hat and wearing a pair of big movie star sunglasses, so consciously avoiding attention that she was sure to attract it, and he waved at her, and she waved back, and he waved her over, and she shook her head. It was lonely in the water. Every second Chris became more and more aware of the divide between the warmth he felt under and above the water and the cold he felt in a thin line right at the surface. There was no gradient, just an immediate, frosty boundary, too cold to be natural. He needed a scale, not polarities.

He rose from the waves and marched out of the sea, like Poseidon ready to strike the seafloor calm with his trident.

“Joanna,” he said, towering above her at the foot of the towel. “Come to the water with me.”

She shook her head, holding onto the brim of her hat. “I can’t.”

He knelt down, face almost level to hers, and removed her sunglasses. She’d worn the pale gold eyeshadow again, and freckles of it gleamed in spite of the shadow. “Why?” he asked.

She leaned in, chewed on her scarlet lip. Wouldn’t look at him. A game of this ensued, but Chris could hold on waiting for a long time. The saltwater was drying on his skin but it cooled him in the face of the sun.

“They’ll see,” she said at last.

“Who’ll see? What’ll they see?”

She bit her lip again. When she opened her mouth to try to speak Chris could see a fleck of red on her front tooth, but it disappeared with a flicker of her tongue. She pointed down into her lap, toward the middle of her hips.

Chris blinked at it. That spot that Joanna had been telling him all week to ignore—that spot that Jon told him to ignore. And here was Joanna reminding Chris that she was Jon. Chris wondered how to argue, not knowing whether he was ashamed of it by itself or ashamed of it versus the rest of him.

So, not even knowing whether it counted as an argument, Chris told him, “If I hold you up against me, no one will see.”

Jon or Joanna let Chris help them to their feet. Chris pulled them into a hug, the skirt slipping around hips and falling to the ground, and Chris then bent down again to pull his spouse onto his back, striding that way back into the ocean. He set them down only once the water was high enough to come to their waist.

“Thank you,” Jon—Joanna—whichever—said.

Chris shook his head. This, one of the lovely moments, didn’t require thanks. “Hey,” he shrugged. “You’re Joanna to me until you tell me you’re not, it doesn’t matter what’s down there.”

She smiled, but asked, “But what if someone sees?”

“Then you’re still Joanna until you tell them you’re Jon.” He tightened his hold on her sides, only long enough for a throb of what could have been a wave to push past them. “It’s not complicated.”

That much wasn’t. Joanna shuffled her feet across the seashells below to press her body, with all its curves and all its angles, against Chris. The chilly divide in the water evaporated away when they kissed, and it stayed far away even after the week ended, and Joanna was Jon again, and they weren’t married anymore. Just two men each in love with another man, spread like the sea over a series of lovely moments.


End file.
